Vancouver's Waldorf Hotel: When does preserving heritage go too far?

Vancouver's Waldorf Hotel: When does preserving heritage go too far?

VANCOUVER — The Waldorf Hotel is not easy to find. In fact, its operators freely touted it as a cultural hub in the “middle of nowhere.” It was the spot where serial killer Robert Pickton spent 25 years cruising for victims and, despite a $1.6-million renovation to spruce its dive bar image, after two years the operators had started asking for rent forgiveness.

Thus, when the structure was recently picked up for a tidy sum by one of Vancouver’s many builders of glass condo towers, locals assumed that its death warrant was signed. Protesters would file petitions and stage marches — just like they had done for the Ridge, an aging strip-mall cinema in Vancouver set to close its doors next week — but ultimately, the Waldorf’s kitschy sign would be on its way to the landfill before summer.

That is, until Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson stepped in. “To lose such a historic building would be a big blow, which is why we need to do what we can to protect it,” he declared in an emergency statement issued Jan. 11, adding that he was dispatching the city manager to take all possible steps to protect the 66-year-old motor lodge.

Architectural preservationists saved the Eiffel Tower from the scrap heap and kept wrecking crews from George Washington’s house. The modern preservationist, however, lives in a new and complicated era where strip malls, bars, canneries, bridges and even highways are fair game for the historic places registry.

And when everything can be sacred, cities must confront a new metric of what heritage is good and what goes way too far.

In 1992, Walter R. Tucker III, the mayor of Compton, Calif., put forward a proposal to extend historic protection status to Santa Fe Gardens, an apartment complex in which future president George H.W. Bush had brought up his young family in the late 1940s.

Of course, in the decades since the Bush family had packed their bags for west Texas, their comfortable California home had denigrated into one of the most bullet-riddled, crime-ridden corners in the United States.

The complex in which another future president, George W. Bush, had taken his first steps was now “a dull-brown maze of boarded windows, squatters and fear,” in the words of the Los Angeles Times.

“I can’t believe they want to make a historical landmark out of a crack house,” resident Lorraine Cervantes told the paper.

“Preservationists can get really caught up in an aesthetic ideal and see it go horribly wrong,” said Chris Bell, the Portland-based cultural resources coordinator with the Oregon Department of Transportation.

He cited Portland’s Ross Island Bridge, a 1926 crossing of the Willamette River. Highway officials hoped to update the bridge to be more “Portland-friendly” with wide sidewalks and ample bike lanes. Stared down by the State Historic Preservation Office, however, officials compromised on a design that kept the “insanely narrow” lanes while installing safety upgrades that obliterated the structure’s historical charm.

“Now we have this really bad functioning bridge which theoretically looks historical,” he said.

Born in Detroit, the North American capital of doomed heritage buildings, Mr. Bell secured a master’s degree in historic preservation before landing a job with the state. Preservationists are his people, but he says he must also grapple with “the continual scraping and rebuilding of the landscape.”

David Blanchard is one of Hamilton, Ont.’s most powerful downtown property owners — and also one of the most historically minded. He lives in a heritage house and, to date, his preservation credits include a stone Bank of Montreal from 1929 and the Pigott Building, the city’s first skyscraper.

But last year, Mr. Blanchard proposed something new: A $120-million complex in the downtown that would be among the largest developments in the city’s history. He had the drawings and he already owned the whole block, and all that was left to do was demolish a string of dark, dilapidated mid-19th century buildings whose condition Mr. Blanchard described as “a brownfield above the second floor.”

The buildings scared away tenants, but they nevertheless had friends in city council who in December took steps to block the project’s demolition permit.

Earlier this month, Mr. Blanchard complained to the Globe and Mail about people “trying to tell us what to do” — but in a recent release he abruptly changed course, agreed to pay the substantial cost of the preserving the facades of the buildings and praised the fact “that Hamiltonians care about the history of their city.’’

“When people hear the word ‘heritage conservation’ they think about some screwball minority in the community [who] is going to thwart them every time they turn around,” said Rick Goodacre, executive director of Heritage B.C.

Living in earthquake country, where many historic buildings double as seismic death traps, Mr. Goodacre’s job is arguably harder than most preservationists.

His solution is not the bylaw book or petitions but coordinated heritage programs in which activists are assured they won’t have to lie in front of bulldozers and developers are assured ample assurances that their heritage investment will pay off.

“Heritage is … not trying to stop people, it’s working with people,” he said. “When people start seeing owning a heritage building as a negative thing, then your heritage program is over.”

The textbook example of preservation gone wrong is the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1970, the church was a bizarre concrete cylinder installed in a city renowned for its imposing homages to the architecture of Ancient Greece and the Renaissance.

In 2007 — against the fervent objections of the church’s congregation — the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board pegged it as protected historic place.

To lose such a historic building would be a big blow, which is why we need to do what we can to protect it

Faced with a lifetime of worshipping in a windowless cement bunker that they would not even be allowed to paint, the church utilized an obscure federal religious statute to overturn the board’s ruling before a district judge.

“In the eternal battle between the people who live in the city and an arrogant elite who think they know better, score one for the people,” declared Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher at the time of the church’s court victory.

Toronto’s meteoric population growth has made it a perfect crucible for ideological battles between those looking to Manhattanize the city with the trappings of a metropolis and others hoping to maintain the quiet, low-density reality of decades past. Cynics already argue that the nostalgists won.

The most potent example is the Toronto streetcar network, a transportation system Wikipedia makes sure to note is real and not used for “tourism or nostalgic purposes.”

Vancouver, for one, ripped up its streetcar tracks in the 1950s to install a still-humming network electric trolley buses. In the 1970s, Toronto’s efforts to do the same were blocked by a team of high-profile activists — including the legendary urban thinker Jane Jacobs. The result: One of North America’s busiest downtowns is choked with 19th-century rail carriages that ensure round-the-clock congestion by blocking two lanes at every stop. They are also inaccessible to strollers and wheelchairs and claim an annual tithe of cyclists dismounted by kilometres of slick streetcar tracks.

“Many of our architectural failures should be put out of their misery — now — so that we can try again. Similarly, too many old buildings are detritus from previous generations and survive only because we are desperate for a heritage, even if it’s banal,” wrote Toronto commentators Kelvin Browne and Lee Jacobson in a 2008 editorial for the Post.

In Vancouver, following Mayor Robertson’s vow to save the Waldorf, critics denounced it as a sentimental bid for hipster votes.

“There’s nothing wrong with businesses closing; we’re not going to be cool forever” said David Duprey, local entrepreneur and owner of the city’s Rickshaw Theatre.

Under different circumstances, he said, locals would simply cut their losses and set up shop in an old warehouse across town. But Vancouver’s strict guidelines on performing arts venues can quickly shoot upgrade costs into seven figures – well beyond the reach of most artist collectives.

In fighting for the Waldorf, he said, people are not so much fighting for their memories of an East Vancouver motor lodge, but for the latest casualty in a steadily-dwindling collection of suburban cinemas, dive bars and run-down theatres.

“Things change, that’s fine, but in Vancouver we don’t have the opportunity to create anything new.”